Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Historical Note
About the Author
ALSO BY LAUREN WILLIG
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
The Masque of the Black Tulip
The Deception of the Emerald Ring
The Seduction of the Crimson Rose
DUTTON
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, February 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Lauren Willig
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Willig, Lauren.
The temptation of the night jasmine / by Lauren Willig.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-440-68574-3
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To Abby Vietor
For more reasons than will fit on this page
Prologue
January, 2004
SELWICK HALL, SUSSEX
“Not there,” said Colin. “Huh?” I looked up from slinging my bag onto the guest room bed to see my very recent boyfriend hovering in the doorway, looking as sheepish as a strapping, six-foot-tall Englishman can contrive to look.
“That is, unless you would prefer this room,” he said, developing a sudden interest in the floorboards. “I had hoped you might stay, um, down the hall, with me, but if you would rather have your own room . . .”
“Oh!” If the floor had been less stubbornly corporeal, I would have sunk through it. “I just—ooops. Autopilot,” I exclaimed, scooping up my bag with more haste than grace.
Having stayed in that room on my last visit to Selwick Hall, B.D. (before dating), I had automatically retraced my route without giving any consideration to the thought that sleeping arrangements might have changed since then.
I grimaced in what I hoped was a suitably penitent fashion. “I didn’t mean—well, you know.”
It’s amazing how many land mines there can be in the first month of a relationship. Goodness only knows we had had more than our fair share of land mines, rocket fusillades, and artillery batteries in the short period in which we had known each other. And I’m not just referring to romantic sparks.
“I was afraid it was my snoring put you off,” he said with a slight smile, one of those comments that’s clearly meant to be a joke but doesn’t quite make it.
“No, just your habit of stealing all the covers,” I said, deadpan.
To be honest, I didn’t really know whether he snored or not. As for the cover stealing, I just took it on faith. In the month in which we had been dating, there hadn’t been as much occasion as I would have liked to find out. He lived in Sussex; I was based in London. My basement flat was the size of a postage stamp, with a sloping bathroom ceiling designed to brain anyone over five and a half feet; he stayed in the flat of his aging great-aunt when he came to town. While Mrs. Selwick-Alderly wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of an Edwardian chaperone, I wasn’t going to risk being caught sneaking out of Colin’s room at two in the morning, like a guilty teenager. I hadn’t even been that sort of teenager when I was a teenager.
Our week together in Sussex killed two birds with one stone. One, I got my hands on Colin. Two, I got my hands on his archives.
And by archives, I do mean archives. That was how Colin and I had met, a very long three months ago, in the ides of November.
At that point, I had been in England since August and had learned three crucial things in that intervening time: (1) if you need to get anywhere, the tube will break down; (2) the reason so many British women have short hair is because their shampoo comes in tiny bottles; and (3) if no one has ever tackled a dissertation topic before, there’s probably a reason why.
It was that third item that was the real clincher. I had been so smugly proud of the topic I had chosen as a G3 (that’s third-year grad student in Harvard lingo). My colleagues were all working on riveting projects like “The Construction of Gender Identity in Franco’s Spain”; “ ‘Mine Golde Doth Yscape Mee’: The Household Accounts of James I”; or, my personal favorite, “Turnip Mania: The Impact of the Turnip on the English Economy, 1066-1215.” Let them have their turnips! My topic was exciting; it was sexy; it involved men in knee breeches. What wasn’t there to love about “Aristocratic Espionage During the Wars with France: 1789-1815”?
I had overlooked one crucial fact: Spies do not leave records. If they did, they wouldn’t be in business long.
The spy I most wanted to track down, the one spy who had never been unmaske
d by French agents or American historians, had been in business for a very long time, from 1803 all the way through to Waterloo. No one knew who the Pink Carnation really was—because the Pink Carnation had been at great pains to keep it that way. I wore tracks through the lobby of the Public Records Office at Kew; I froze the reference computers in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library; I nearly got locked into the Bodleian. By November, my laptop was beginning to look more than a little bit battered, as was I.
Fortunately, I had one last card to play.
Not only had Lord Richard Selwick, aka the Purple Gentian, bequeathed a hearty pile of documents to his descendants, their owner, an elegant lady of a certain age, kindly extended to me the right to read them. However, as all readers of fairy tales know, any good treasure trove comes with a dragon. In place of scales, my dragon wore a green Barbour jacket. Instead of a hoard of gold, he considered it his personal duty to guard the cache of family manuscripts. From me.
Have I mentioned that he was a decidedly attractive dragon? When he wasn’t breathing fire at me, that was.
Let’s just say he came around in time. As Shakespeare so sagely said, All’s well that ends well. Not only had I found more material than I could have ever hoped for my dissertation, I had acquired a boyfriend in the process. It was like a buy-one-get-one-free sale. On Manolos.
It was, in a word, the utter end in happily ever afters.
The only problem with happily ever after is the ever after bit. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy. And, as far as I could tell, Colin was, too. At least, in the limited time in which we had been together.
Therein lay the rub. A mere two weeks after our first official date, Christmas had flung us our separate ways. My tickets back to New York had been booked and paid for well before there was any whiff of a relationship on the scene. As for Colin, he spent Christmas Day in London with his great-aunt and sister and New Year’s in Italy with his mother, all of which made phone calls more than a little bit complicated. Every time I called him, there was invariably someone in the background pulling Christmas crackers (his great-aunt) or jabbering in Italian (his mother, who apparently liked to pretend she wasn’t actually English anymore). Every time he rang me, there were my parents, conspicuously pretending not to listen, and my little sister, Jillian, squealing, “Oooh! Is it the boy?”
Might I add that Jillian is nineteen and at Yale?
Jillian likes to say that she’s mature enough to be immature. My parents call it something else entirely, and did so very loudly, contributing to the din as I pressed my cell phone to my ear and tried to sneak off to my bedroom unseen.
Anyway, between our families, we seldom managed more than a few moments on the phone unmolested. By the time I had returned to London, in early January, Colin had gone off on some sort of business trip to foreign climes. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what his business was. At this stage in the game, it seemed a little tacky to ask. I’d been dating him (even if we hadn’t been in the same country for most of it) for nearly a month and a half. Shouldn’t I know by now what he did? On the other hand, it was too soon in the relationship to demand to know where he’d been. I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.
I consoled myself with the thought that it was probably something farm related. From the few comments Colin had made, I got the impression that most of his time these days was involved in trying to make Selwick Hall and its surrounding lands self-supporting, recruiting tenant farmers to do whatever tenant farmers do. Since my knowledge of agriculture is limited to the fact that milk comes from cows, and cows say “moo” (thank you, Fisher-Price), I didn’t have much to contribute on that topic.
Considering that Colin used to be an I-banker or, as he would put it, “something in the City,” I was surprised that he did. But, then, he had been raised in the country, so perhaps some of it came from pure osmosis. I had been raised in Manhattan. The only thing I had osmosed was how to hail a cab.
“Don’t worry,” Colin said as he led the way back down the hall. “I’ve stocked up on extra blankets.”
“Women feel the cold more than men,” I said loftily. “Besides, our clothing is skimpier than yours.”
“Amen to that,” said Colin, with an appreciative squeeze of my shoulders. Not that there was much skin to be squeezed through my layers of shirt, sweater, and quilted Barbour jacket. But I appreciated the thought. That was certainly one way of turning up the thermostat. “And here we are.”
It was certainly a much larger room than mine—I mean, than the room I had stayed in last time. There were windows on two sides, by which I cleverly deduced we must be in one of the wings rather than in the central block of the house.
The first thing I noticed, naturally, was the bed. It was a big old four-poster, practically high enough to require stairs, prosaically covered with a very modern blue duvet, clearly Colin’s contribution. What is it about men that makes them always go for either deep blue or fire engine red for their bed coverings?
Aside from the duvet, and the small change and various personal possessions littering most available surfaces, the bedroom must have been decorated in the late nineteenth century and not overhauled since. Curtains in a William Morris print of twining golden flowers on a crimson background hung from the windows, faded to a pink and beige by continual exposure to the sun. The paper on the walls was the obverse, red flowers on a golden background. It was hard to tell whether the draperies and wallpaper were the original or a reproduction. If they were reproductions, they were very old ones.
“It’s the pimpernel print,” said Colin, seeing me looking at the wall.
Huh? Was that like the Poe Shadow or the Da Vinci Code?
“The wallpaper,” Colin said patiently. “It’s Morris’s pimpernel print. A bit of an inside family joke, that,” he added.
“Oh!” Wiping off my village idiot expression, I laughed a little too heartily. “Of course! Didn’t he have any pink carnation paper?” I asked archly, in a belated bid to make up for my sluggishness.
“Too obvious,” said Colin. “And too feminine.”
“I don’t know,” I said, ostentatiously taking in the room, with its heavy, masculine furniture, and incongruous navy blue duvet. “You could do with a bit of pink in here.”
“I’ll settle for one redhead,” said Colin, suiting actions to words.
There are some positives about the early stages of a relationship. I figured I’d better take advantage of it while it lasted, before we descended into the “who used the last toilet paper roll?” stage of the relationship. If we lasted that long. But I wasn’t going to think about such things now. Instead, I happily wound my arms around his neck and concentrated on convincing him that one redhead was a necessary accessory to any room.
After an indeterminate amount of time, we broke apart, smiling foolishly at each other, as one does.
“Right,” said Colin, in that way men do when they’re trying to look like they’re in control of the situation but haven’t the least idea of what they meant to say. I couldn’t help feeling a little bit smug. If they can remember their own names, you’re doing something wrong. “Um, right. Make yourself at home.”
I grinned. “I thought I was.”
“You might want to take off your coat,” Colin suggested mildly. “And unpack your things.”
“Oh, those.” Things seemed vastly immaterial at the moment. And I didn’t like to tell him that taking off my coat seemed a tad too adventurous, given the climate. No, I’m not referring to any fear (or hope) that Colin would commence bodice ripping once the protective armor of my Barbour was removed. I meant the literal climate. It had to be about forty degrees in the house. With deep trepidation, I remembered reading biographies of the Mitfords—or was it someone else?—in which everyone seemed to spend childhoods in English country houses covered with chilblains.
That was one of those little things we’d have to work on. I am a child of central heating. I may have grown up in a cold climate
, but I preferred to keep it on the outside and me on the inside, next to a toasty radiator.
But it was still early days, so when Colin reached for my coat, I meekly let him remove it, rather than squealing and clutching desperately at it. I was very glad I had layered on that extra sweater.
I watched indulgently and made suitably admiring noises as he displayed the amenities of his room, including the drawer he had cleaned out for me, presumably by dint of shoving everything that had previously been in it to the back of the wardrobe. There was a phone on the bedside table, email access down the hall in his study, hangers in the wardrobe, and a fine collection of dust bunnies under the bed. He didn’t mention those last, but I found them nonetheless. I assessed them with a connoisseur’s eye. If one could make a fortune by breeding dust bunnies, I would be endowing chairs at universities.
While Colin checked his cell phone messages, I grabbed a handful of lingerie in two fists and hastily stuffed it into the drawer he had opened for me. I had packed for all contingencies, i.e., a silk slip nightie and a heavy flannel one. Given the temperature in the house, I had a feeling I would be using the flannel.
A door on one side of the room led to an en suite bathroom, confirming my impression that this must be the master suite. Did Colin’s mother really dislike Sussex enough that she had relinquished all claim to residence? All I knew was that she lived in Italy, with a second husband. Colin tended not to talk about his family much. I’d managed to gather that his father had died of cancer a few years back and his mother had decamped to Italy. It was, however, unclear whether the decamping had occurred before or after.
There was no sign that a woman had ever inhabited this room. The furniture was all heavy, dark wood, and the wardrobe and drawers would never have begun to accommodate the accumulated clothing of two people rather than one.
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